Nostromo, Joseph Conrad’s South American novel reminds me somehow of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, perhaps the setting of mines in South America. The underlying political ideologies are also reminiscent to some extent on Rand’s objectivism, and both author’s guileless mistrust of democracy ambles towards, but never wholly approaches, a Nietzschean ideal. In this aspect, Nostromo “the incorruptible” can be compared and contrasted with Kurtz, Conrad's archetypal villain from Heart of Dark [...]

Nostromo is considered by many to be Conrad’s greatest novel. The ambiguous nature of good and evil, the importance of duty, common themes in all of Conrad’s novels, get an epic treatment in Nostromo (my Modern Library edition is 630 pages long). But for all of its length, the novel, after the first dense, foundation building 50 pages or so, reads quickly. Published in 1904, the book has the feel of a modern novel. It’s a book about revolutions, money, and character, told through different [...]

Between 1902 and the year of its publication (1904), Joseph Conrad was caught in an abyss of depression, financial collapse and severe gout, but somehow still managed to write what is a deep and adventurous novel, albeit a dark one. Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, was originally planned as a short-story but was to become his longest work, with the composition it would lead him to say "I see nothing, I read nothing. It is like a kind of tomb which is also hell where one must write, write, write [...]

noere is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and it is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle (p423)On the reread I feel that this unrelentingly bleak novel is the novel of the twentieth century, at least for a fair proportion of the population of the world, this could be the country of Heart of Darkness once it had achiev [...]

This is a character study of Europeans remaking themselves in the New World, in this case the fictional South American country of Costaguana. As in other books by this master that I’ve enjoyed over the decades (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer), I enjoyed the collision of the characters’ sense of noble purpose and the reality of corruption and self-interest that forever infests human enterprise. On the plus side, we delve into the minds and struggles of a larger cast of charact [...]

"He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life." J. Conrad, NostromoA splendid story of romanticism, adventure and vice. Conrad employs an intricate narrative structure, intertwining four character studies and differing points of view around Sulaco, an imagined South American country, a ticking bomb with a violent past. He perfectly contrasts these against the fabulous scenery of mist-hidden mountains and a silver mine. The novel begins in the midst of thin [...]

Nostromo is a very fine book and a great pleasure to read. The first reason is that if you are interested in hearing the opinions of their favourite authors and in Nostromo certainly has a lot of things to say about very many topics. Second, many people are fascinated by Conrad's analysis of United States as an Imperial Power in Latin America.Unfortunatley, because of Nostromo's good qualities it often makes it way onto to undergraduate course lists where it does not belong. In order to air his [...]

Nostromo was a difficult read for me. I started this book many years ago and gave up after the first 50 pages. This time I plowed through, and I'm glad I did. There's a lot of depth to this novel, but you don't see it until about halfway in.The story takes place in a fictional South American country called Costaguana at the turn of the 20th century. An Englishman named Charles Gould has inherited a ruined mining concession, and undertakes to restore it, mostly as a means of sticking a thumb in t [...]

Conrad is cynical, in the best sense of that word. Lord Jim was one of my favorite books, and Nostromo is probably even better. Although it is difficult to become acquainted with the characters at first, the reader cannot help but understand them in a profound way by the end. Conrad's worldview is disturbing but also compelling, as he uses character, symbolism, and allegory to tell a realistic story with an abundance of lessons.

Wait a minute, is this what Joseph Conrad is? I thought maybe I'd read The Secret Agent at the wrong time, because I felt like I should like it but I sortof didn't. I tell people I liked Heart of Darkness, but there's this vague air of uneasiness that I can't quite put my finger on: I've read it three times but I don't really remember it. And here I am at Nostromo, which is about a revolution! And secret treasure! This is exciting! And here's the thing: it fucking isn't. Here's Joseph Conrad's d [...]

A Wonderful Book to Have ReadThe tense of my title is deliberate. Virginia Woolf described Nostromo as "a difficult book to read through." A Conrad biographer called it "a novel that one cannot read unless one has read it before." I take both these verdicts from the excellent introduction to the Barnes and Noble edition by Brent Hayes Edwards, and they come as some relief. I generally find that introductory essays give away too many plot points, and this is no exception. But having read a little [...]

I've tried. I really have. But after one short story (The Secret Sharer) and four novels (Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, Lord Jim and now, Nostromo), I've come to the considered conclusion that I really don't appreciate Conrad. I admire him for his prodigious output, especially since he's a non-native English speaker who only learned to speak the language fluently when he was in his 20s (and even then, reportedly with a strong Polish accent). But with perhaps the exception of The Secret Ag [...]

An almost perfect Novel. I can't think of but a handful of writers (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Melville) who have written a better book.

A masterpieceThe funny thing is that for about a third of the novel, I had this strange feeling that there is something that was alluding me, something that I was not quite getting, like the story was for ever reason hard to follow and yet at the same time I felt immersed in the story and wanted to read more and more The characters seemed as real and as vivid as they possibly could had and still I felt a sense of distance, a fairy tale feeling. As I made my way towards to end, I had a feeling of [...]

This is my third reading of this strange and remarkable book. As I began re-reading the first half of the story, I felt disappointed -- as if my taste as the young student who first read this book had somehow traduced me. There was no central figure in this story: It was certainly not Gian' Battista Fidanza, a.k.a. Nostromo, the handsome capataz de cargadores; nor was it Charles and Emily Gould, owners of the San Tomé silver mine; nor was it the host of other characters that Conrad parades befo [...]

“She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.” ― Joseph Conrad, NostromoI’m opening this review with a quote that to me personally seems to reveal something of this novel’s complexity. Universal comprehension, the suggestion of what lies beneath the surface, at times even mysticism…all of this can be found in this novel, for Conrad’s works are very profound and complex [...]

DNF at 85 pages. This was a second attempt. I was so bored I couldn't make myself go on. I think I got to about 150 the first try. Maybe I'll push through it some day after I've read and enjoyed other books by Conrad.

Nostromo begins with a legend. The story goes, among some of the people of Conrad’s republic of Costaguana, that two wandering sailors- “Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for certain”- persuade a local man to take them out across the Gulfo Placido to a desolate, inhospitable peninsula, where the locals believe there is gold. “The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth”, believe the peninsula to be cursed. On the second even [...]

Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo" gets much love, perhaps more than any of the writer's works: the Modern Library ranks it high among all novels and F. Scott Fitzgerald was a particular fan. But in all the discussion about "Nostromo", I have yet to see any commentary on how oddly constructed it is. Conrad gets many things right about nineteenth century Latin America: the struggle between economic liberals and traditionalists, the deciding importance of the Army and especially its charismatic generals, [...]

I found this highly-acclaimed novel, "Nostromo," by Joseph Conrad quite tough to read, I mean how to focus on its mysterious plot, lengthy narrative, unfamiliar Spanish/French words or sentences, etc. I had no choice but kept reading based on my heart's content, that is, I'd read whenever I was in the mood and regarded it as a kind of my sleeping medicine. I kept consoling myself that I loved him since I had read his "Heart of Darkness" and "Lord Jim", therefore, this was simply another reading [...]

“Nostromo” de Joseph Conrad é uma obra que pretende acima de tudo evidenciar os efeitos e consequências, tanto negativos como positivos, que advêm do interesse económico de potências externas na riqueza de nações em desenvolvimento. Para ilustrar tais consequências e impacto, tanto a nível politico como individual, o autor recorre á fictícia província de Sulaco, parte de Costaguana, cuja principal fonte de riqueza é a mina de prata de São Tomé, deixada por herança ao inglês [...]

This one's tough to review. I want to recommend it to everyone, but that's probably just a waste of a lot of time. I read this about ten years ago as a young college student, and just re-read it. Even while re-reading, the only things I remember are i) wondering to myself, if this book is called Nostromo, why is Nostromo absent for most of the book? ii) a short passage about bringing people into a paradise of snakes, and iii) Nostromo saying to himself "If I see smoke coming from over there, the [...]

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NOSTROMO. (1904). Joseph Conrad. ***.I remember having to read this in college. Other than that, I don’t remember much more. I had already read “Lord Jim,” and “Heart of Darkness,” so I felt I had a grasp of Conrad’s writings. I was wrong. Since then, I’ve read many reviews of the book, and many of them stated that you had to get by the first fifty pages before the story began to open up. In my case, I found that it was more like seventy-five pages. The simple solution, of course, [...]

At once an epic Boy's Own adventure and a grand philosophical novel, in which Conrad creates a little world somewhere on the coast of South America and peoples it with heroes (who turn out to be not so much flawed as all flaw, well camouflaged), villains (for whom there are explanations, but never really excuses) and the great mess of humanity in between. The status quo is corrupt, the revolutionaries thuggish, and the incomers cannot help but destroy the very land that has drawn them. Every gra [...]

Knottily plotted. The story hurtles forward only when a special narrative device is used. Otherwise the omniscient narrator is almost always a marker of description and stasis. The novel feels uneven; there are sharp edges, there are mellow troughs. These qualities are somewhat soaked by our eponymous hero as well. His heroism, although meant to be vain, can also be just damp at times. There are beautiful long sentences that make you go tsk-tsk regarding the state of all, even literary, writing [...]

Minirecensione in forma di elencoTrasvolare magistrale da un personaggio all’altro, nell’avvolgente oscillare avanti e indietro del tempo e nel complicarsi dei punti di vista; miniera d’argento, ferrovia, feroce politica sudamericana dell’Ottocento; neocolonialismo.

I'm not going to finish this book. Maybe another time. I find Conrad's sentence structure to be clumsy and over-laden with descriptors. It's difficult to ascertain the meaning of one sentence even after reading it several times. I find myself asking over and and over again, "and why is this supposed to be a great author?" I've tried reading more lightly to see if I can pick up a thread, a plot, a story-line. The writing just doesn't seem coherent; it doesn't flow. It's choppy. If each page was a [...]

I decided it was time for more Conrad, one of the writers at the top of the pantheon, or in the pantheon whatever. The introduction copyright is 1961. I decided to read that after I finish upon encountering a massive spoiler in it. WHY do publishers DO that? This is not the first time that's happened to me either. BTW, I have NOT read this book before Moving on - slowly. Conrad employs his ironic mode to set the stage for us. Even though we're reading about an armed struggle in Sulaco, he can't [...]

Another solid Conrad novel, which I liked just a bit more than The Secret Agent. I thought the book's main points about corruption - specifically, how wealth twists and perverts people - were very effectively conveyed by Conrad's decision to set the book in the fictional Latin American country of Costaguana. Latin America is notorious for its long history of unstable caudillo government caused in part by the exact type of resource extraction displayed here in Charles Gould's silver mine, around [...]